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Student Experience Blog

The Ways We Rush

Mon, Feb 17, 2014

I'm not going to lie to you, guys: the start of spring semester has been a crazy amount of work so far. I suppose in a lot of ways I brought it on myself - I could have prepared my articles for the upcoming issue of the Coyote earlier, I could have spent more time preparing my fiction piece for a scholarship competition during the break between winter and spring, I could have chosen classes to take that required way less reading (my ENG-333 seminar has me reading at least one Hemingway novel a week, for example), and so on. So far I've been able to stay on top of everything, but last week, Delta Tau Delta's spring rush events really did their best to stop me from doing my homework at reasonable hours of the day.

Traditionally, our chapter has avoided holding our semester rush weeks until the second or third weeks of the term, allowing both active brothers and potential new members to find their academic footing before making the time to enjoy each other's company. The reason this semester has been a little different is because this week, a huge chunk of our executive leadership is going to be taking a trip to San Francisco for the annual Western Pacific Division Conference, this year falling from February 20th through the 23rd. As cool as that trip is, it's hard for a chapter to function without its president, vice president and treasurer, particularly during such a major recruitment period. Thus, we had to move our rush week earlier than what we had previously planned so we could have leaders on hand to make sure recruitment ran smoothly.

Having recruitment the first week isn't exactly a bad thing in and of itself, but it was hugely inconvenient for me. I happen to be one of the guys going to San Francisco in a few days, which is going to be super awesome and everything (as will the accompanying blog post!), but missing two full days of classes so early in the term is never ideal. With the vast amount of reading and writing I need to do to keep up with my English classes, I had no other choice than to attempt working ahead during the first week of classes.

You know. At the same time as the Delts' rush events. And at the same time my Coyote articles were due. Oh, and the same time a potentially game changing scholarship application needed to be finished.

This, my friends, is overbooking. I'm sure you know the regular definition of this term, which is simply scheduling too much stuff at one time than could possibly get done effectively. But I've always liked thinking about it in the context of professional wrestling. I have a point here, I promise. Overbooking in the context of the WWE, or TNA, or any other major wrestling promotion, is when a match is way too saturated with thrilling spots, high flying moves, and general mayhem that it becomes impossible to remember how the match evolved into a state of anarchy. Crowds become so distracted by all the cool stuff happening in and outside of the ring that they may forget what exactly the point of the match was supposed to be in the first place.

Given all the stuff I've been juggling the last few days, I'd say that's an apt analogy of my life right now. One moment I'm going out to eat with my brothers and potential future brothers at Keystone Pizza in Caldwell for a recruitment event, the next I'm doing a close reading Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Another moment I would be independently practicing a new piece of musical material for Major 6th (a killer arrangement of Sting's "Fields of Gold"), then suddenly I would be stressing out over what sort of dialogue a troubled young girl would have with her teddy bear for my scholarship piece. It wasn't until last Saturday that I was finally able to refocus my complete energy on the last rush event of the week, which was a formal, invite only dinner held at the Delt Haus. I was able to devour delicious pasta and salad dishes and laugh alongside all the cool people I had gotten to know better through the week without worrying about due dates or page numbers or Ernest Hemingway.

This college life can really get hectic, in case you haven't been able to guess. People rush fraternities, they rush through homework assignments, they rush through obligations, and eventually they just rush through time itself, only scratching their heads to wonder where it has gone after it has already passed. I'm hoping that once the San Francisco trip is done, I can once again find the time to rush through all these moments less and enjoy them for what they are.